8300HD and External SATA - It Works!! - Page 292

Originally Posted by weetoots

I spent the night reading about 8300HD and others. My reading told me that some will and some won't allow an external drive. I'd like to be sure before I buy.

I have a 8300HDC s/n SABRTGRJT, ODN 4.0.2.4 and I've seen the word "mystro" but not the word "Navigator". The box has a 160GB WDC drive.
I would like to add a eSATA drive. There is a port in the rear. Maybe a 500GB or 1T externally.

From what I have shown you, can you tell if it will accept the eSATA drive.

Thanks

Originally Posted by NewPrometheus

The HDC model does not support eSATA, .

Originally Posted by cpercival

I recently purchased a 1 TB WD DVR Expander (WDBABT0010HBK-NESN) for my SA8300HD running the Passport IPG. Charter is my provider and I live in Massachusetts. Install went fine. Powered up the box, then powered up the drive. Asked me if I wanted to format. Did that and saw a big free space improvement. There are 2 problems that I am running into now:
1) If I pause or rewind a live show, the picture will often freeze then skip forward, tile and pixelate pretty badly, or even skip back 30 seconds or so.
2) To test it's recording prowess, I scheduled a bunch of HD recordings overnight. When I checked the following morning, maybe a third of them either ended early or started late, and I didn't get full recordings.
I still have another 10 days or so the return the HD if I can't figure this out. Did I pick the wrong one? Is the speed of the drive or its cache size the issue? I can't find specs for it. What's a better drive if the DVR Expander is the culprit?
Any help would be appreciated.

Go to the very first post in this thread. There is a data base for people's results with various externals.

Originally Posted by cpercival

No listing for Charter there. Also, what specifically is causing the freezing and the incomplete recordings? Is it the transfer speed, the drive speed, the size of the cache? The box recognizes the drive so compatability doesn't seem to be the issue. It just chokes on the data.

Originally Posted by cpercival

No listing for Charter there. Also, what specifically is causing the freezing and the incomplete recordings? Is it the transfer speed, the drive speed, the size of the cache? The box recognizes the drive so compatability doesn't seem to be the issue. It just chokes on the data.

Originally Posted by Cardio

After using an external esata drive with various models of Comcast DVR's branded Comcast, Cisco, SA or Motorola I have found that:

An external drive larger than 500GB willnot function correctly, if at all.
It may format, at least on a Cisco RNG200HD, the latest box, but you will get various errors and space over 500 GB is not even recoginized. I have been able to get a 750GB drive to work, for a time, but the functionality is still unreliable and the space over 500GB is not available.
The brand of HD is not an issue, nor is the speed of the drive 7200RPM~5400RPM. The brand of external enclosure may be, as the SATA I/O interface may vary somewhat from one brand to another. This should not be if they were all designed to the specifications of the interface but this does not appear to be the case. But the bottom line is that you will never get a drive larger than 500GB to work reliabily.

Comcast has no real information on this size limitation,, Surprise,,,,or even knows what you are talking about usually. Call them and ask, they just look down the "answer list" not find one and say something absurd. SA does not release any information on their publicly available literature either. I don't know if this limitation is part of the DVR's hardware programming or in the software of the Guide interface. We have just received the "new" Comcast Guide in Houston and I have not yet tried a larger drive using it. I will soon and will post what I find. When I asked Comcast's advance tech service they said "the new guide contained many new features". I thanked them for the useful information.
You lose all recorded programming if you change the external drive then reattach the previous one. Each time a drive is attaced it is formated if it's directory does not match the directory on the DVR. This also makes it impossibe to replace a full external drive with a new one and then later retach the 1st drive to play archived material on it.
A rather senseless limitation and typical of cable TV providers. It is difficult to understand the poor performance of huge companies; selecting horrible pieces like their REMOTE CONTROLS (purchased in millions), Cable boxes that are, at best, very low quality and stupid Guide implementation, the "new" Comcast guide is, in most respects, inferior to the previous antique one ....... until you consider that they are all virtual monoplies with no real competition. Satellite is not without its problems but I am about to go to Dish and forget cable. With a Dishnetwork DVR, 622,722,922 at least maybe others, you can add up to a 1TB external drive..........BUT they charge you a fee ($69) to turn on the esata port allowing you to do so. Charge you to attach your own drive!!

Please excuse the rant but I have fought this problem for years.

Originally Posted by NewPrometheus

Incidentally, I have been successfully using a 1TB eSATA drive on one Time Warner SA 8300HD cable box, and a 300GB eSATA drive on another cable box of the same type, but that is not why I am writing.

In my experience, I have found that Time Warner does not adequately regression test their software updates on relatively older equipment. This has become extremely irritating with regard to their cable modems, so I recommend that everyone trading theirs in every 3-6 months for a newer model. Now, even though that issue is with regard to cable modems, it has informed my suspicion that Time Warner also does not adequately regression test their software updates on relatively older cable boxes, such as the SA 8300 HD, as I've noticed increasing instability in my units. Accordingly, I plan to trade these cable boxes in for newer models/units that support eSATA drives, but doing so would destroy my existing eSATA "video library" as the content is encrypted with keys specific to each cable box unit. So, before doing that, I need to archive my "video library" somehow, and I'm writing to find out what has worked for the community.

What method do you recommend?

I have a rare Philips DVD recorder which accepts _component_ input, which I had hoped would be allow me to archive the content in HD via the component outputs on the SA 8300 HD, but the video quality that results is somehow very disappointing. If anyone has insights as to how to remedy this, please do tell.

Otherwise, I'm thinking of a few video capture solutions now on the market which should accept HD content via _component_ input, and will supposedly store a resulting output file on my computer. Is anyone using one of these? What has been your experience?

Thank you!

Originally Posted by NewPrometheus

What method do you recommend?

I have a rare Philips DVD recorder which accepts _component_ input, which I had hoped would be allow me to archive the content in HD via the component outputs on the SA 8300 HD, but the video quality that results is somehow very disappointing. If anyone has insights as to how to remedy this, please do tell.

Otherwise, I'm thinking of a few video capture solutions now on the market which should accept HD content via _component_ input, and will supposedly store a resulting output file on my computer. Is anyone using one of these? What has been your experience?

Thank you!

Originally Posted by weetoots

I spent the night reading about 8300HD and others. My reading told me that some will and some won't allow an external drive. I'd like to be sure before I buy.

I have a 8300HDC s/n SABRTGRJT, ODN 4.0.2.4 and I've seen the word "mystro" but not the word "Navigator". The box has a 160GB WDC drive.
I would like to add a eSATA drive. There is a port in the rear. Maybe a 500GB or 1T externally.

From what I have shown you, can you tell if it will accept the eSATA drive.

Thanks

Originally Posted by weetoots

I emailed Oceanic TWC referencing my SA8300HDC and the addition of an eSATA drive.
Their response: The DVR has an eSATA port on the back. To verify if your DVR is capable of using an external hard drive, please check the manufacturers label on the bottom of the DVR. If the unit shows that it is Rev:2.0 or later then an external hard drive will work with the unit. Mine shows Rev:6.3.
SA has aligned functionality of these DVR's to work with these external SATA HDD manufacturers models: Iomega, Seagate, Western Digital and Maxtor.
Appropriate SATA drives are labeled that they are compatable SA DVR set-tops.
SA does not warranty the reliablity of the SATA HDD. Time Warner does not support the use of external drives at this time. It may be used by the customer at their own risk.

Fair enough.

Originally Posted by phousley

This is the most definitive response we've ever seen from TWC.

Originally Posted by Phil Conundrum

I have been pleasantly using an external device for some years. Once the power supply went out on the external. Bought a new box put in the drive and fine ever since.

However it was a 160gig drive and I keep running out of space.

Today I put a brand new Seagate 1gig 32mb buffer 7200rpm drive in. It would not recognize the drive. I followed all the directions to the letter and it would not give me the message asking me to format it.

So, took the drive out and tested it for everything on my pc - checks out fine.

Put the old drive back in the box connected to the 8300. Works fine.

What is going on here ? Also with the Passport there is no way to get to the diagnostics that we used to have before Cox "upgraded" us to Passport. So I could not see if at least the hardware was recognizing it.

Suggestions any one ???

Thanks,
/phil

Originally Posted by Bryan_CoxPHX

Diagnostic Mode for Passport
To Enter Diagnostic Mode: Simultaneously press and hold the SELECT and EXIT buttons until "DIAGNO" or "DIAG" appears. Release the buttons, then press EXIT and the the box tunes itself to the multi-page Diagnostics channel. After this process the Diagnostic pages can be accessed by directly tuning to that channel using the remote, once you know the channel.
Most likely the Diag Menu is a channel listed in the guide also.

See the post above yours, Success with a WD Caviar Black, most here would agree that is the HDD to use.

Originally Posted by Phil Conundrum

I tried using the select/exit earliier today multiple times on multiple remotes and did not succeed in getting into diagnostic mode.

/phil

Originally Posted by regulator8

Although all the recorded programs were listed I couldn't access any and the Recorded Capacity which was at 43% earlier was now at 0%. I removed the drive, reformatted, ran ChkDsk and everything checked out ok. Now the DVR does not recognize the external drive. Anyone have any suggestions?

Originally Posted by TNO821

That certainly sounds like impending hard drive failure despite your successful chkdsk. There are several things that can fail on a hard drive...I just received a replacement 750 GB Seagate hard drive 2 days ago; the original seemed fine to me, but was triggering a S.M.A.R.T. error upon booting (thankfully I was using it internally via SATA, not as an external USB drive, which I believe is unable to communicate S.M.A.R.T. info). I Binged the S.M.A.R.T. error code (kidding, only kidding, I Googled it) and it was related to a mechanical failing causing the spin-up time to be grossly excessive. If ignored, I'm confident that the drive would eventually fail to spin-up altogether (though it never actually exhibited any symptoms that I could notice, other than the S.M.A.R.T. error message that occurred at boot time after the memory check, and the Windows 7 error message that told me the drive was likely to fail soon).

I highly recommend that you download, install and run the Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostic Tools for Windows

Do not run it using a USB external drive connection. Run it using eSATA or SATA.

Originally Posted by regulator8

Thanks. I will give the Diagnostic Tools a try and report back.
--Ed

Originally Posted by Bryan_CoxPHX

Check your power supply too, when mine went bad I had a similar experience.

Originally Posted by regulator8

Do I check output voltage with a VOM? I think it should be 12v & 5v DC right?

--Ed